Exploring Artifact Definitions in Project Management Education: A Case Study in a French Engineering School
Résumé
The objective of this study was to examine the concept of artifacts from a cultural perspective within the context of project management education at a French post-secondary engineering school. As such, this article presents a case study exploring the construction of artifacts by engineering students in project management education from a cultural perspective. Specifically, the study focused on a group of eight students who designed a project which required an introduction to project management. A case study approach (Yin, 2018) was used to observe students’ activities and conduct interviews with students following the instructional sequence. The Nvivo 12 Plus software was employed to identify artifacts in the data built by students. Following this initial analysis phase, the various types of artifacts were classified into categories as defined by Impedovo et al., (2017). The results showed recurrent categories of artifacts constructed by students: intermediate object, knowledge artifact, instructional artifact, epistemic artifact, and technical object. Identification of these categories provided the means to question and develop artifacts in project management education in the following different ways: firstly, to define the meaning of artifacts in project management education; secondly, to discuss the integration of scientific and technical disciplines in project management education; and thirdly, to highlight the normative practices resulting from the scope statement, which encourages the pragmatic construction of the artifacts.